When working to melt bronze inside The Foundry at Rowan, sometimes things don’t go as planned.

“It decided to give up on us,” said Charles Tucker, art professor at Rowan. But, he said, that doesn’t mean you give up.

“The blower that allows us to melt metal broke. So you go to Lowe’s, get a leaf blower and a roll of Duct tape and hook the leaf blower up in the foundry and by 10:30 at night we’re up and running again.”

Each Monday evening, Tucker, along with a handful of students, mostly those who study sculpture and metals — “overlapping skill sets” — pour bronze into molds at the foundry to help create a piece for internationally recognized artist Mel Chin. Chin’s sculptural work, “Shape of a Lie,” is being cast for his 40-year retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art set to open in February.

It was the friendship between Tucker and Chin — the pair met in 1998 — that prompted Tucker to get the university’s foundry back on the radar. It had been something like 20 years since it was used to cast art projects, he said.

“I wanted to bring in an artist of high note,” Tucker said. “I wanted to get the bronze foundry up and running again with a significant project.”

The idea is for it “to become The Foundry at Rowan,” said Susan Bowman, chair of the Department of Art, and to continually “bring in professional artists to work on projects.”

Foundry art projects can cost an artist thousands of dollars to create, she said. So this collaboration between the university and artists can be beneficial to both parties.

“We want artists to say, ‘Oh, you have a foundry there?’ Artists would get a grant for their foundry project and come here to work with us,” Bowman said.

It would give students a unique opportunity, allowing them to work with professional artists on their pieces.

View full sizeRowan University art students work on a project by artist Mel Chin inside the foundry on campus.Photo provided

“It’s an internal internship for the students,” she said.

It's an internship opportunity that Mary Gaunt, an art education student at Rowan, said has been an amazing experience.

“This is the first time I’ve ever done anything quite so serious in sculpture,” she said. “I’ve worked with wood before, but this is bronze. It’s been really great.”

And on this project, the first of hopefully more to come to Rowan, the students are working on a real project with a real time line, Tucker said. Casting a large work such as Chin’s has been an invaluable experience for these students — all women, Bowman noted — who have had the chance to work in the foundry doing multiple jobs.

“We rotate the art students. Each pour varies. Sometimes we have eight or nine students in there. Ideally, an average pour should have six people,” he said.

“We take turns doing different jobs. Everybody has a different station so the pour will go smoothly,” said Gaunt, of Newfield.

The project being cast in the foundry is actually “a bunch of different pieces” that will be put together and hung on a wall at the museum in New Orleans, Gaunt said.

“It will be a big sculpture,” she said.

And since it’s made out of bronze, it’s also very heavy, she added.

“It’s a lot of fun and it’s really physical work,” Bowman said of the students’ work in the foundry. “It’s got that edge of danger ... you have to really know what you’re doing. It’s really exciting for the students.”

The Foundry at Rowan was installed in the 1970s, Tucker said, and has run intermittently over the years. Getting the foundry running again also has the potential to encourage community programs at Rowan. The students currently working at the foundry are all matriculated art students, but eventually, it could branch out to include continuing-education possibilities for people interested in just learning something new.

“It has the potential to enrich the overall community,” he said.

And for Gaunt, who will cast her own bronze sculpture this coming week, something she's very excited about — this experience has been enriching in ways beyond her dreams.

“Before doing this, I’d never seen it done before and I’d never done it before,” she said. “So it’s been wonderful.”